smar sw history

The beginning is 1987, then I met Sikora and we started to be interested in the punk movement. Before, we listened to metal, but we lacked a message and there was little of it except hard music. Sikor recorded two songs Exploited on the radio and that was it. We met Sezon in the meantime, but he hesitated for quite a long time about changing his musical interests (hence the nickname). On our way we also met Mixer, a man who was the main driving force of the anarchist movement in Rzeszów. He directed our fascination with the punk movement towards bands such as Crass and Conflict as well as towards anarchism. We began to be active participants in such movements as WiP (Freedom and Peace) and Anarchist Intercity (today's Anarchist Federation). We were also lucky to live near the "that's it" club, it was a thriving venue for many concerts and other cultural events, the most legendary club in Rzeszów. Bands like 1984 and one million bulgarians have rehearsed there. We spent a lot of time there listening to their music. I think that this and the participation in many good concerts that took place then in Rzeszów made us think about our own band. In the meantime, we met Ninje who has just moved to Rzeszów. There were four of us, which is just right for the band. After a concert, we took the cracked cymbals and used drum films, stretched what was at hand and our first drums were created. We borrowed a Kosmos electric guitar from a friend and connected it to the Ludwik radio and this is how our first guitar stove was created. I went to my older brother who was playing guitar something and told him we had a punk band and that he would teach me to play guitar. He told me: "He will not teach me because if I want to play punk, I will sing songs in the style of 'fuck no beer'". So our first text was created and we started to learn to play.

From the very beginning, our biggest problem was the lack of gaming equipment and space for rehearsals. One of my friends told us that the addiction treatment clinic has complete gaming equipment and it is at a high level for those times. So we started going to therapy. But we didn't care much about therapy, and we used more and more of our treatment time to play. It took several weeks before the therapist realized that we were making him an idiot and we were generally interested in playing. And they kicked us out because we didn't want to be patients. We moved to the school where Ninja attended school for a few rehearsals, but we were not wanted there for too long, because freaks, they corrupt the youth, etc. There was nothing else but to ask my parents to buy the cheapest equipment. When the equipment was available, Mixer took us under his wing, which had a house in Zwięczyca near Rzeszów. This is where our first material, "In unity, strength" began to take shape, and long discussions with Mixer shaped our views and developed our anarchism. In the meantime, we co-organized many demonstrations and happenings that took place in Rzeszów. One of the most spectacular actions was the seizure and occupation of the Provincial Committee of the Polish United Workers' Party. This and the following actions resulted in the fact that we received the premises from the city, where the "ALTER EGO" Free Culture Association was established. WiP was also active there, providing advice to people who wanted to avoid military service, and a library for freedom. Besides, there was finally a place to meet and plot against the system. It was the heyday of the Rzeszów underground and there was no problem for several hundred people to appear at the demonstration or happening. But nothing good lasts forever.

Hard core is in fashion. What are some on the stright edge. Divisions began. On the one hand, high school "intellectuals", "positive" (as opposed to "negative" no future punks) hard core'ers, and on the other, the so-called "station punks" (due to the fact that they were mostly non-local people and therefore spent a lot of time at the station). For some time we tried to be a bridge between these groups, but in the end we chose the "train station" ones. We started to be ignored when organizing any action and more and more often (due to the orthodox pacifism of the "positive") we only served as protection against bums and gits at demonstrations. The ideological problem was that our "positive" colleagues on the wave of the so-called "positive programs" wanted to create some specific alternative to the system, which, in our understanding, would be just another system, but established by them. For me, the mere negation of the system is already an alternative and you don't have to come up with "only right" solutions for everyone. Anyway, it was similar all over Poland then, and many zines were bursting with feverish polemics on this subject. As a provocation, we started to define the genre of the music we play as adolf hitler hard core. The time has come for the first concert. It was on May 17, 1990 in the infamous "that's it" club together with the Hungarian group Trottel. We made up for the lack of technical skills and the stage fright of the first show with the degree of drunkenness. Some of our provocations for Trottel, a singer who was not aware of the Rzeszów reality, seemed to promote fascism and she gave us "good" press in a few zines. We, emboldened by the first show, started to think about the next ones. One of the most interesting was the concert in Świlcza near Rzeszów. I must mention here that at that time there were no skinheads in Rzeszów and their role was taken over by metalheads and there were notorious clashes in the streets with the annual big battle on the first day of spring. Returning to the concert, it turned out that only our friend Irek came to the concert with his girlfriend (the rest were afraid) and a whole host of fascist metals. We thought we wouldn't get out of there alive, we were about to get the fuck out but we decided that we would play for Irek and his girlfriend. And what was our surprise when it turned out that a lot of these metalheads also started having fun at the concert, even though their bosses forbade them to do so. The fact that we didn't screw up, we earned respect from these motherfuckers and we could safely leave.

We played a lot of rehearsals and more and more concerts. The band was becoming known in an ever wider circle. Great concerts are worth mentioning here: on April 27, 1991 with the excellent German band Sumpfpapste and the Dreschmaschine in Warsaw, on August 24, 1991 at the Punk Piknik in Ciechanowiec (it happened there) and on September 14, 1991 in Września near Poznań where we recorded our first cassette " They're all fucking ours. We published it ourselves in 50 copies. An interesting fact was my and Sikora's trip to Bielsko Biała for the Chaos UK concert. We got quite well on the way, got stuck in Krakow and only thanks to the help of two nice girls we barely made it to the concert. There it turned out that we have tipped the whole money and we don't even have a ticket. Fortunately for us, it turned out that a band that was also supposed to play did not come there and we skitched the organizers that we are the whole team here and we can play instead of that band. We brought in some friends who were also out of cash as team members and continued to play inside. The problem started when it turned out that we had to play soon and we were in such a state that we could not even remember the title of the songs, let alone what to play there. However, there was full mobilization and the two of us played quite a good concert, warmly supported by the audience. At the end of the year we met Janusz Krzeczowski from Krakow, who had contacts with the "Wave" publishing house, he liked our playing very much and invited Jacek, the owner of "Wave", to our concert on January 18, 1992 in Rzeszów, of course to the "that's it" club. We played there with the band Kolaboranci. Jacek recorded this concert and it is from it that the famous cassette "concert in Zalesie" comes from. Jacek liked it and the next day we went to Krakow to record our first album. The "Wave" studio was one room in Jacek's house and a six-track tape recorder, but for us it was a paradise anyway. In two days, aided by good cannabis and the presence of our friend Korab, we recorded twenty songs and this is how "In unity is strength" was created. The album was sold in several thousand copies and soon we were known all over Poland.

On March 21, 1992, we played a legendary concert in the Korony Hall in Krakow. There were about a thousand people, half of them with badges destroy Nazism, but a group of 10 skinheads, Cracovia fans came in, they were kicking people and spitting in their face but no one reacted. We couldn't really understand it and during our concert we started calling them names and a moment later I couldn't stand it and kicked one of them from the stage, a little trouble started but the security took over. The bald people told us that we would not leave Krakow alive, and after the concert, 100 people came to us to escort them home because they are afraid and we are so brave. We were fucking scared ourselves. We decided that they would be looking for us at the main railway station, so we would go to the Kraków Płaszów station. We were waiting for the train to Rzeszów, eight of us were left, the bald ones did not show up and it was past midnight so we started celebrating my birthday. Finally the train comes, we get in, and it turns out there are those motherfuckers armed with baseball bats inside, and it started. I think that just because it was a fight to the death, we let go of those twice as big cocks as we are, so screw that they didn't go to matches for a month because they were ashamed of what they looked like. From then on, we were heroes in Krakow and made our own deadly enemies among skinheads, which was reflected every time we played in Krakow afterwards. This and other actions, plus the achievements of our friends from "railway stations", contributed to the creation of the legend of yellow laces, the so-called "skin hunters". Anyway, most of the concerts at that time were in trouble with the Nazis.

As the band was already known, we decided it was time to play in Jarocin. We went to the band auditions which took place a week before the festival. There was a wonderful atmosphere in Jarocin at that time. Great crews came from all over Poland, and there wasn't all the cattle that came to the festival itself. There was no prohibition, just like during the festival, so the whole week was feasts until dawn. No slicing, no killing, no glue bags, just a city of punks and other libertarians. But back to the auditions. Owsiak and Chełstowski were filming Jarocin at that time. At Auditions, you would play two songs or ten minutes. We installed ourselves on the stage and started to play, the sleepy hall started to play, a nice pogo started. We decided that with Owsiak we still have no chance to qualify for the festival, so we will do a concert here and now. We didn't react to his screams that our time was up and we kept on playing, In the end he fucking turned off the electricity. He pissed us off because a cool concert was made of it and people started having fun, but we broke the norm and the rules. He is lucky that it did not fall into our hands then, but it almost got Chełstowski, who a few days later we mistook Owsiak, and we were in such a state that he had to explain for a long time that he was not Owsiak. Nevertheless, we played on the last day of the festival in the "rejected concert" on the small stage. In that Jarocin we met and made friends with a great crew from the coast - Gdańsk Fortress - I greet you warmly. From that time, I especially remember the concert on January 9, 1993 in Gdynia - Rumia. It was our first concert on the coast. The atmosphere was amazing, three microphones in the audience all the time, the whole hall singing all the lyrics. After the concert, we fucked up the Nazi gang who attacked us at the train station - urghhh!

So 1993 came, we started making material for a new album, Mixer left Poland much earlier and we were traditionally struggling with the lack of space for rehearsals. Once, when we were counting, it turned out that we were rehearsing in thirty places. Last year we decided that we would not go to Jarocin, but only for social purposes. As usual, we showed up a week before the festival, but this time it turned out that Kuba Wojewódzki (the idol) was shooting Jarocin and he decided that only two punk bands Wlaty and Liberum Veto will perform on two stages during the three-day festival. In addition, the main sponsor of Jarocin were the companies: Marlboro and Pepsi Cola. The introduction of corporate sponsors combined with the promotion of poplin music, ousting the festival of independent music, which had so far been the meaning of its existence, and increasing commercialization - that was too much. People were pissed off, and the most frequently chanted slogans were: "give our festival back" and "Kuba Wojewódzki is an inhuman prick". After the performance of Wlaty and Liberum Veto, Einstein (the vocalist of Liberum Veto) said from the stage that the entire band SMAR SW is in Jarocin and if people want to play it. After several dozen minutes of chanting of three thousand people and the occupation of the stage, the organizers, fearing riots, agreed to perform in a few hours. We borrowed the instruments and made a dry rehearsal. It was finally time for the concert, and the atmosphere was tense from the beginning. We started playing, people were climbing up the stage and after a while it was fucking pogo. The concert was going on and there was really strength in unity, people were coming and the organizers, fearing for the equipment, said that either people would leave the stage or stop the concert. We asked people to sit down because they would trample the equipment and there would be no playing. People sat down and when it seemed that everything was ok, security guards burst onto the stage and began to push people off the stage into an almost two-meter-long concrete moat separating the stage from the audience. The bodyguards were armed with baseball bats, chains and chair legs. When they pushed people off the stage, a hail of stones and everything that people had at hand rained down on them. A regular battle ensued and the bodyguards got a solid kick. Then the heavily armed police entered the action, cordoning and fucking everyone along the way, no matter if someone was involved in it or not. And security guards with foam on their faces began to take revenge on people by beating extremely brutally. At that time, Jarocin employed guards from kickboxing clubs, judo and wrestlers from local sports clubs, students of the Wrocław University of Physical Education, students of the Poznań School of Quartermaster and skinheads from the Lech Poznań fan club. Their boss was an older guy (we saved him from lynching), who knew his stuff, but he had no control over his people, who were so dry with the tense situation that they couldn't stand it and attacked the people who were sitting calmly. The balance of this incident is several dozen injured people, many hard, completely fucked up scene and equipment, all for two reasons: not counting people and employing bandits as bodyguards. Who was there knows how it was. Of course, they tried to hold us responsible for the whole incident, and the media? - I quote the election newspaper: "The protests of several hundred punks who caused riots on the Small Stage, protesting against the commercialization of Jarocin and the participation of Marlboro, remain the voice of the noisy minority, which will eventually cease to influence the organizers. The festival becomes a commercial event and ideology or charity actions have become for Jarocin a ballast rightly rejected by this year's organizers ". No wonder, today the election can justify the war in Afghanistan or Iraq, and the opponents of these wars and people fighting the occupation of their country can also be called a "noisy minority".

After Jarocin, we recorded the next album "Fight for your rights". Due to the lack of a so-called "independent" publisher, the album was released by Silverton. The album sold around 50,000 copies and is a record for punk records in this country. Certainly the reasons for this were the events in Jarocin and the fact that we were on the front pages of newspapers and TV news for several days. We were happy that so many people could listen to our lyrics and music. It is a pity that no "independent" label decided to release this album because it could repair its budget well. It's also a pity that the so-called "indie scene" named us commercial pigs back then just because Silverton was the distributor of our tapes. Maybe the so-called bellwethers The "independent scene" would wonder: then where were we to release the album if you could not release it due to the correctness in relation to the trends on "your" scene at that time. But I will write more about it later. Fortunately, people have their own brains, and not everyone shared the correctness of the stage guys. On September 16, 1993, we played a fucking concert with the English band Herb Garden in Katowice. People a meter away from us in crazy pogo, microphones in the audience, and the steel ten-centimeter pipes separating us from each other broke in three pieces (the club boss laughed later that all the concerts so far endured and Kat's endured and fell on us). At the turn of 1993/94 we played some good concerts, including in Otwock with old friends from the band Jesus Chytrus Oi, in Głubczyce with Liberum Veto and in Działoszyn. On February 26, 1994 we played in Tczew, it was the last concert with Ninja. We kicked him out of the team because he was showing fascist aberration, his visions of the punk movement more and more often resembled the military, of course with him as one of the generals. Apart from that, we wanted to develop both in terms of text and music. In the text, for understandable reasons, we had less and less in common, and in the musical Ninja he wanted to stay on the "Fight for your rights" stage, we were already moving towards the next album "Consciousness".

Ninja was replaced by Kaktus, one of the first punk players in Rzeszów, and a very good bass player. Work on the new album is in full swing. We played a few concerts and it's time for Jarocin 94 (last one). This time we were an invited guest, they treated us like an egg. We were given a hotel and a car with a driver at our disposal. Anything but we don't want to be dissatisfied and sometimes we don't think about doing reruns from last year. Only this time there was a brawl because the cops decided to keep the guy who burned the pipe and they wouldn't let him out of the bitch at their friends' request. There were riots provoked by the police, as a result of which nearly 70 people were injured, including 40 policemen. Broken windows and damaged buildings over a length of 30 meters. 3 police and 3 civilian cars that were used as barricades demolished. Torn paving slabs. Street fights lasted almost 2.5 hours. Prevention units of 271 policemen, equipped with truncheons and rubber ammunition, were sent to pacify. On the second day, when we went to the press conference to hear if the media would throw all responsibility on the "noisy minority" this year, I was kidnapped by three plainclothes and thrown into an unmarked car. I thought somebody decided not to play this year. Only after two hours in one room with a dozen pissed off cops who tried to break me by all means, it turned out that I was accused of shooting with live ammunition at the policemen and it took me another two hours to prove to them that this time he he no I. But I had the opportunity to get to know how the cops treat people who raised their hand on them and on what grounds the accusations are made, how the witnesses are selected, etc. we lived with our new music then, and besides, punk is not a wish concert. We played a few more concerts by the end of the year, including November 15 in Katowice with Oi Polloi.

In December 1994 it was time to record a new album "Consciousness". We chose the SPAART studio in Boguchwała near Rzeszów, where Andrzej Karp, one of the best Polish sound engineers, worked there. We had a very good cooperation and in six days we had the material ready. In my opinion, this is our best-realized album. And here I will come back to the so-called "independent scene". We wanted to release this record in some "independent" label because only Silverton made money on the previous one, we only bought better equipment for playing it, and that was a fraction of the sales profit. We sent the material to many labels and we got quite a promising response from qqryq productions, I quote Pietia: "The material is awesome. I'm interested but I have to wait for the decision of the partner to make a decision." And we did not live to see it, because partner Zbyszek was afraid of how the "independent scene" would react to the fact that they, qqryq, were released by bands like us. We waited for half a year, in the end, wanting to deal with the next album and get back the money we put into the studio, the material went back to Silverton, they didn't linger. I'm going to go ahead a bit here, but I want to close this topic already. When a year later I returned to qqryq, this time with the album "Suicide", I had to convince them for a long time to stop flattering the tastes of the so-called "independent scene", and they started to release music that they like. Finally they agreed, but what was my surprise when it turned out that the release of the album was accompanied by this leaflet: "If you are a bloated activist of the independent scene - better listen before you smile ironically, Jarocin's apple trees are a thing of the past. SMAR SW focused on development, their farewell the material is honey to the ears of fans of heavy music, crazy rock, dark poetic texts, the dark side of civilization. " What Jarocin apples? What about the admiration for the previous album? Nothing, it turned out that the "independent label" is dependent on its own cage and has to explain itself to "bloated activists", realizing that our image in this "scene" was created by "inflated activists" and based on rumors because as "pompous activists" they could not come to our concert or listen to our records. And finally, I have never received a settlement from qqryq for the album "Suicide", and the material was returned to me after 6 (in words: six) years from the expiry of the publishing license. Complete "independence" from contracts. I had the opportunity to get to know both the "dependent" and the "independent" scenes and I can say one thing about it - these scenes are no different, except that the first one makes more money. That's why we never wanted to be in any of them, we just wanted to be SMAR SW and we succeeded.

I ran ahead and there were a few more incidents along the way. After recording "Consciousness", we played a few more concerts with Sikor, but he decided to stay in Amsterdam, where we had been going for some time. The living and playing conditions here in Poland were quite difficult for people like us. We were supposed to stay there together, but I figured I'd try one more album. Sikora was replaced with the drums by our old friend, the work on the material was fantastic, we had a rehearsal house at our disposal at any time of the day and night and we played them as often as never before. We felt that our most thoughtful material was being created. We played a few shows. However, it turned out that the album is too ahead for those times and was appreciated only in a few years. We made the recordings in June 1996 in the SPAART studio, unfortunately this time with a poor sound engineer. It is a pity, because the album is very dense and could have sounded much better, but it still captures our spirit of those days. We decided that "Suicide" would also be SMAR SW's suicide and ended our activity as a band.

stay strong... stay punk...

yogi

you think you think ... you just think...
they think for you they think in your head...

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